Respect/Respectful/Respectfulness and Dental Work

A person I admired called me disrespectful.  We disagree but the precise implication was that they by contrast ‘disagree respectfully’.  

In communication theory one of the strongest schools of thought is transactional analysis. This suggests that communication break down occurs when a person speak to another not as adult to adult, or parent to parent, or child to child but rather innappropriately as in parent to child or adult to child, the so called ‘talking down’ or ‘we are not amused’ or ‘who made you sheriff’.  

I have been fascinated by the shift in political debate from logic to purely rhetoric and marketing.  For a decade I’ve used Canadian Parliament as an example of the worst communication strategies.  I’ve suggested our PM should wear a wife beater under shirt because his ‘gas lighting’ and ‘never addressing questions’ but using all openings for promotions and blaming is the outright lowest form of communication.

There is a palpable arrogance of the indoctrinated left who believe that they are ‘right’ as only a parent can believe they are right and rapidly their discussion shifts from adult to adult or child to child into their taking a parental tone in speech or the very nature of the communication.

In marriage therapy I commonly encountered this distraction from the discussion at hand when one or the other said,”don’t use that tone’.  As a hamm radio operator we commonly tell each other to turn down the ‘squelch’ however this is mearely a break in the communication to repair the technology it doesn’t ‘stop’ the discussion.  However emotional communicators can easily ‘derail’ discussions by shifting from adult to adult to being the ‘child’ and suddenly claiming ‘victim ship’ or by claiming the parent and suggesting ‘you shouldn’t speak like that’.  

In the movie Grand Canyon a punk brandishing a gun says ‘do you respect me? The old guy replies “I respect the gun”:.  

I was drinking and joking on holidays with a group of tourists we’d met in Mexico decades ago when this fellow out of the blue, or it seemed to me, said ‘You can’t speak to me like that. You have to show me more respect.” “I’m sorry I said “I didn’t mean any disrespect’, I said not knowing what I’d said or done that triggered his reaction.  But at that moment he waved to some men in the near empty bar and three guys came over and opened their sports jackets showing their guns.  I’d never seen a mini oozie outside of a movie so truly remember that moment. The other two guys had hand guns.  I can honestly say I respect the gun and apologized profusely and was glad to get away alive. I also never wanted to play there again and have never returned.  

The old adage is you have to ‘earn respect’.  Much older and more experienced and now having worked in jails and asylums I can honestly say I probably didn’t do or say anything to ‘upset’ this person since as a cartel criminal with respect based on violence earned as such I would tend to believe this is a game he plays to assert his authority with his gang, joining in with rich tourist, I was poor in the company I was that night, mostly university professors and businessmen . None but him would ever have had the need to dominate the conversation with such a shore of force. There is this idea of an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.  By contrast I remember an argument with a Harvard PHD I had and I remember we all deferred to his opinion in the matter of physics not only because of his obvious authority on the subject but also because he made sense.

My South American professor friends says she finds Canadians insipid because they won’t talk about religion or politics and are too emotionally immature to shout about such subjects as she and her friends do in cafes when they’re not taking sides in soccer games.  She escaped from being tortured and left her country when a dictator took over and only returned a decade later.  I enjoyed working with refugees and torture victims and listening to the lessons they learned about politic.  So many these last few years have told me that the communism they escape in Eastern Europe is now here.  Persians tell me that Trudeau is just like the Ayatollah’s men. Always there ‘politeness’ and ‘people playing nice’ then the gloves come off.  

The business of ‘victim ship’ is ‘micro trauma’ and of course those who can be hurt by a ‘slight’ are very special and can get ‘stolen glory’ from those who by contrast have the scars of jails, cigarette burns and lashes.  Stolen glory

The definition of ‘respect is the ‘feeling of admiration or high regard for someone or something”.  Synonyms for respect are ‘esteem’ and ‘veneration’.

So in a discussion if a person uses ‘rhetoric’ to ‘muddy the discussion’ , a particularly distasteful form of communication like ‘muddying the waters’ does saying the person who has assumed the role of sheriff or parent is being ‘hypocritical’ suggest ‘disrespect’. I respect the gun.  The victim wins by massing others to do ‘proxy violence’.  

The women’s liberation movement and suffragette movements arose in the time of chivalry when a woman could feint and men would rally to defend her. Now we have an era of ‘false allegations of sexual violence’ or ‘rape’ where so often the ‘victim’ says ‘well he would have ‘or he had that tone’ or ‘micro violence.’  

In parliament the opposition party constantly said yes or no answer please to the childish leader who would not engage as an adult but use any opportunity to blame, shame and then self advocate while never answering the question.  We were raised on Perry Mason which became the Lincoln Lawyer but all we see is Goebells and Hollywood.  Accuse the other guy of what you did and lie lie lie.  

There a concept of ‘terms of engagement’.  In marriage therapy no one plays the ‘court game’ because who threw the first punch can never be answered.  Respect is earned.  

We are kind to each other. Being kind to the proverbial Hitler does not mean I would treat him with admiration or high regard.  

I shared with my friend the anti Americanism is again being promoted by our government.  It was the same when the American objected to Victoria dumping its sewage in the oceans so Canadian condoms were all over the Washington beaches along with other refuge. Eventually Victoria cleaned its sewage but politically it demonized Americans and played the ‘we are Canadians’ card implying our shit didn’t stink.

I miss the CBC with Barbara Fromm and truth and honesty in Canada before the Liberal Party became communist china with the Mao Cultural revolution censorship and the CBC as the liberal newsletter.

I’m a conservative and remember when I stopped drinking that I realized that my being liberal was because they supported free drugs and binge drinking.  I miss the country songs that preceded today’s marketing of booze and the rock and roll songs that promoted peace and had insights that we don’t hear in rap.  I am so dissapointed in the news. I probably don’t show a lot of ‘respect’ to people in political discussions because it always seems that someone is getting paid for their position and my own experience is dealing with the elderly and disabiled on fixed pensions and the fat cat liberals and those with indexed pensions or owning houses that are sky rocketing in price while the food banks are being used the highest amount in history.

I’m not retired. I don’t’ have a pension or health care or all the advantages that others have but I have had wealth and privilege and am doing just fine but the atmosphere of fear that has been percolated in Canada this last decade affects me as all those i know and care about are buying chicken instead of steak and staying home as opposed to going on vacation.

So I’m probably just not a wanting to hear more ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’.  “Jan 6 was as bad as Pearl Harbour” Democrat ranting and Bill Gates polluting the sky allegedly to block the sun and slow global warming with C02 the food of plants and our breath demonized by arts students.  It’s all bizarre and I’m told again ‘You are being expelled for saying ‘fuck’.  

I respect the gun and I don’t want to play with people who want me to ‘behave’ as they do.  Disagree with me but don’t tell me how to behave in peaceful conversation. 

I remember being drunk at a New Years Eve party and these two women showed up for the lobster feast my friend put on. I think I said ‘nice tits’ because the woman had nice tits and was wearing a big hole fish net top that did nothing to cover herself up. She was competing with skin and frankly I must have thought they were nice tits because I said that. She had a glass of scotch and threw it at me. I ducked . And the glass broke on the wall. The host came over and asked her to leave.  She said ‘did you hear what he said.  My friend said yes, “nice tits’. Bill thinks of himself as a conneoseiur of tits and probably is but we respect freedom of speech in this house and don’t respect violence.  If Bill hadn’t ducked you would have hurt him and as it is I’l have to fix the damage your glass did to the wall so please get out’.

I was so disheartened to hear that British are being jailed because there is no longer ‘freedom of speech’ there.  L

I am here on the border of California, Arizona and Mexico.  I’ve been enjoying talking with people with a variety of view. Interestingly the Mexican merchants I was speaking with who my friend Laura and I like are appalled at their corruption and mismanagement of cartels and borders. I was fascinated to hear them describing their president as we describe Trudeau.  Meanwhile I was in a line and a dozen of Americans around me were thanking their lucky stars for Trump because they had hope for their economy now. Several vets were glad that he was pulling them out of the stalled wars which 70% of money was going missing.  

Another Canadian and I shared how we so enjoyed being able to travel to the US and hear a different view from the propaganda of CBC and eastern Canada.  I’ve personally been enjoying Smith from Alberta’s and wonder what I’m doing staying in BC when so many of the people I respect and admire have moved to Alberta.  Well, I keep thinking about fasting from food as it’s obesity that’s the basis of cancer and fasting counteracts it. Fasting also can cure cancer early.  

Yet here I am feeling alone and isolated wishing I could agree with the sickness of communism as it pollutes . I’ve spent so much of my life at variance with group. Not drinking these last 26 years has been a huge difference. I sometimes miss the stupidity of dope smoking .  I got to church and hear the minister sharing that the pope says we shouldn’t be putting up walls and I can only think of this Emperor Pope Francis in his Vatican country a veritable fortress.

Hypocrisy. I thought I was a hippie because I was turned on to hypocrisy. 

Oh well I miss the editor who would take this reduce it to a paragraph and make me a bunch of money. As it is I journal and journal and journal and feel better in the end .

Saying thank you Jesus. I hope I can stay in Canada. I love the wilderness. My friend moved to Texas. I thought of going to Ireland yet I love my life now leaving BC for Jan and February to get sun because I’m afraid of dying of pneumonia now having had a near death experience with Covid in Bombay.  I also had a year of treatment for TB and too many friends are dying. I’m of that age. Another mentor died. 

It’s a sunny blue sky day without the wind and warmth instead.  I have a little work and calls to do but really it’s a free day between dental treatments.  Tomorrow my mouth will be done and I can move along with a major task of self care and treatment completed.  

Thank you Jesus. Thank you God. Thank You Holy Spirit. Thank you Trinity. Thank you 3 in 1 god . Thank you ancestors . Thank you Mom and Dad. Thank you brother and cousins and aunts and uncles and living and dead. Thank you grandparents and great grandparents. Thank you neanderthals’ .  Thank you Homo Sapiens. Thank you CO2 and O2. Thank you Sun and Moon and Stars. Thank you planet EArth.

Thank you God of Gods.

 

Moderate Moslems

Of course there are moderate moslems. There are Moslems saints and wise men. There are beautiful Moslems and happy Moslems and Moslems who sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of humans who are not Moslems.
I feel badly that I have had to be critical of the misinformation and disinformation of our politicians and media.  Their cupidity about Islamaphobia and political correctness surrounding terrorism forces everyone to ask, “why are they lying?”  To know they are lying follows asking “Is Islam the religion of peace?"
Islam is no more the religion of peace than Christianity is the religion of love.  It has long been said that the founders of all religions would not going the religions named for them if they were alive today.  Further what people say and what people do is one thing.  What there followers do is quite another.  Mohammed was a warrior and a killer.  He did at times preach peace.  By contrast Jesus was a healer and a teacher who did not kill and did preach love.  Buddha was an elite prince who renounced the world and became a monk who encouraged non violence. Abraham and the other founders of Judaism including Moses and David were patriarchs, kings and warriors.  Some were prophets. And all religions have martyrs. Hinduism is a polytheistic mystical religion begun in the times of warriors but carried forward by ascetic monks and sages.   Confucianism which some say is not a religion but more a philosophy was begun by a eurocrat working for a warlord.
History is made for the winners of wars.  We don’t hear much about the Quakers, a particularly non violent group of Christians any more than we hear much about the Sufis a usually non violent group of Muslims.
The fact is violence is the work of men and women who want power.  Having power they want to retain it and use religions of all stripes to maintain it.  They justify their violence and greed with religion. In the case of the atheist communists they don’t say a prophet told them but instead say their guru Marx or prophet Lenin told them to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with them.  Robespierre an anti-Christian deist was behind the French Revolution killing tens of thousands of his enemies.
Triangulation is a psychological defence in which one individual abdicates from responsibility of their actions one to another by attributing their behaviour to a third party. Today if an individual told me he had attacked me because his voices told him to, I’d consider him insane.  However, many a world leader has attributed violence to ‘voices’, “laws’, ‘committees’, “Gods”, ‘the people’, and today maybe Aliens, all as a means to confuse and control.  No one is certain whether or not it’s worse if a world leader actually believes his own shit or is just using this for the benefit of power acquisition and justification for treating others poorly.  A common ‘defence’ is the ‘greater good’ and for the future. Today all manner of shit is being said on behalf of the ‘future’ and for ‘the planet’.
In terms of logic and fallacy it’s always an ‘appeal to authority’.  There are also laws on earth for the rich and the poor.  The judges who would disagree would themselves be killed.  The winners write history.  The losers, lacking tanks and jets, create the best propaganda and makes the best promises.  They usually have maternal sexy babes with lose morals. The appeal for young men is a sort of mixed of sex and authority thing.  This is not to say that the rulers don’t have their share of “honey pots’ but the women of the ruling classes are more likely to say something like “give them cake’ rather than listen ad infinitum to their rambling intellectualism.
To the best of my understanding, Moslem countries are generally conservative.  It is worth remembering that secularism broadly speaking, the separation of ‘state’ and “religion” is condemned by Muslim intellectuals, and further in most Muslim majority states even where there is secularism there is a parallel court system of ‘sharia law’.
(Canada is definitely moving in this direction with their aboriginal or pagan court system parallel to the mainstream secular court system.  There are also some ‘sharia court systems’ in Canada but no Catholic, Christian, or Buddhist court system showing the fundamental break down of equality and freedom in Canada as just one example of devolution of western secularism. In Europe sharia courts are proliferating just as ‘gang’ justice proliferated in former communist countries after the fall. )
The most liberal of the older Moslem countries appears to be Turkey, Tunesia, and  Egypt.  It is worthwhile to note that these states, though Muslim majority, are under attack to Jihadists indicating how costly it is to be a ‘moderate’ Muslim or indeed a secularist Muslim in the world today.  The Jihadists are equally if not more hysterically enraged by their brother Muslim’s who refuse to accept their dictatorship.
(This is not surprising given that the French revolution killed tens of thousands of their own people while the various communist revolutions killed millions of their own people who disagreed with them.  Indeed “either you’re for us or a gin us’ is neither religious or secular but equally revolutionary as the standard revolutionary argument,  ‘if you don’t agree with me, I’ll kill you’.   ‘Ad hominem’ rhetoric or attack on the person in debate  causes  ‘forfeiture’ of the logical argument  because a long long time ago men realized they couldn’t have a decent game of golf without agreeing that anyone who starts hacking the competition with swords or axes might well live but he will never be respected as a golfer.”
When we think of Conservative or Liberal we general think of freedoms that the citizens have.  Iceland is often touted as a very ‘free’ country but it has to be remembered that comparison of countries is difficult without consideration of the countries make up.  Iceland is a white tribe whereas both Turkey and the US are nations of many different racial and political groups.  Mexico its a conglomerate of Indian groups plus the later European immigrants.
So ‘freedom for the people’ in general really took off in the 1800’s  with the American (1776)  and French  Revolution. The British Magna Carta (1215) before it had nothing to do with the peasants but rather challenged the divinity and authority of the king versus the barons.  This is like democracy itself which was developed by the ‘lords’ and ‘landowners’ of ancient Greece.  The Christian Suffragette movement extended the ‘vote’ to women like the American Civil War extended the ‘vote’ to blacks.  A key questions is always ‘who are the people’ and further ‘who can be the leader’.  In aboriginal society it was common for there to be ’slaves’ and for non tribe members to be considered ‘other than human’.  This is going on today in Canada where an immigrant Sihk is the defence minister of Canada but a US presidential candidate born in Canada is being questioned as whether or not he is an American.  Most nations in the world are highly restrictive, incredibly nationalistic, tribalistic and racist in this regard.   Some say that the Desert Spring of the Middleeast was the civil war and political uprising of the common people that was occurring 200 years later.
Moderation has described the way countries deal with dissent.  Some countries behead dissenting individuals while others jail them.  Others have a wide variety of means for individuals to be critical of their own government.  I’d personally be jailed or beheaded, I believe, in any other country but Canada where Justin Trudeau is our Prime Minister.  I don’t doubt either that Mr. Justin Trudeau would wish as Mr. Harper his predecessor might wish that ‘beheading of dissidents’ was a Canadian ‘custom’ given the rude criticism our extraordinary leaders are subjected to.   Canada has freedom of speech like England and like American.  Few Muslem countries are moderate in this way.
But yes there are very moderate individual Muslims. I know some who are outrageously radical.  They are living in the west because they do not believe they would do well in the countries they have left.  They are ‘cultural’ escapees. They have come to Canada for the freedom they didn’t experience in the Moslem culture in their home.  They prefer the freedoms and moderation and liberties in Canadian culture and they surely do not want Sharia Law or for the culture they left to become dominant in Canada or the west.  They are in many ways like the Puritan Christians who left England because of religious persecution by the State Religion of those who questioned the authority of the church leadership and wanted a more democratic religious church.  The authoritarianism of the Catholic church with the Pope gave rise to the religious wars that begat Protestant Christianity with is nationalist churches as well as it’s presbyterian and congregationalist churches.  Today the fastest growing community Christian churches are in many ways the most democratic with ministers selected by the congregation and voted on rather than being appointed top down by the centralized church authority.    Most Muslims I know  came to get away from the authorities and restriction there and love their new home. Commonly immigrants cite ‘corruption’ in their former countries and a desire to make a ‘new start’ in the country they are going to.  This doesn’t mean that there is no corruption here but the corruption is different and consequently there is more ‘opportunity’ here.  Not uncommonly there is movement back and forth with regard to economic refugees and whole classes of individuals like the ‘gypsies’ who reject national boundaries all together to the great consternation of those most invested in national boundaries. Indeed the countless trade agreements these days is a direct consequence of the entrenching corruption associated directly with ‘boundaries’.
My Muslim friends here are more Canadian than I am in that regard to their appreciation of the freedoms we know in Canada. h.
I just regret that we all have had to look at the numbers and the risks that exist because our media so commonly is interested these days in selling war while some of our political leadership are most interested in selling to the lowest common denominator.
The result is lies.
There are a whole lot of radical muslems.  Wahhabism sect of the Sunni Muslem, preached as a central tenet of mainstream Saudi Arabia  are fundamentally anti freedom, anti western, anti secular, jihadist and commonly utterly disrespectful of other religions and cultures. The salafists are jihadist until proven otherwise.    The aim of these Muslems is world domination in the same way that Hitler and the Nazi’s were world domination or Stalin and the Communists.  To them Muslim is a religion of peace means quite simply when all the world is Muslim and "we are in charge” and “we have killed all who won’t convert”,  then we will have peace.
Most moderates believe in a balance of power.  Moderates respect respect  religious freedom. I love that I have Muslim neighbours, Buddhist neighbours, Hindu neighbours, Pagan neighbours, Jewish neightbours,  Christian neighbours and even atheist neighbours.  I like all the colours of the rainbow.  I love the diversity that we know in Canada.  I know there are those who want only to eat cereal for breakfast and insist everyone else eat cereal for breakfast like they do but I like choice.  I really am a big proponent of freedom and choice for individuals and communities.  I am a Canadian.  I like that I can joke with my moderate Muslim friends about ‘all roads leading to Rome’ but that Christians will have the better housing district and Muslims will have to live on the other side of the tracks.  They say they will have the virgins and I say I will have the music and maybe one virgin.  We don’t kill each other any more than I do with my female Buddhist friend who at the same time tells us men that she believes we will not get to heaven in the next life but rather will reincarnate as pigs.  To which my Hindu friend insists that he was a pig in a previous life and that’s where he learned his bad habits.  My Catholic friend loves bacon but doesn’t like this talk of pigs.  She rejects Jews and Moslems because she love her bacon.  And such a conversation among friends can occur in Canada among a group of deeply spiritual and religious individuals who are moderates.  I don’t know any fanatics.  I expect if I did I’d have to kill them before they killed me.  So as a Canadian I prefer peace because I can get on with science, loving, community and art rather than devoting myself to watching my back and killing the fanatics before they kill me.
I am a physician too.  Physicians commonly say ‘moderation in everything.’  So I like my moderate friends and am skeptical of my extremist friends.  I have no fanatic friends but I certainly have friends whose behaviours and thoughts are extreme by my personal rather conservative behaviour and thought. I am however most skeptical of those that lie especially politicians and the media. Lying people in power scare me.  Scaring people pushes them to  extremes.  I therefore wonder why some people in power who lie and deny legitimate concerns and threat are so anti moderation and in favour of war.  That concerns me. I’m less concerned about my moderate Muslim friends than I am about liars in general.   All my Muslim friends are equally concerned about radicals and extremists as I am.  None of my moderate Muslim academic doctor friends favour jihadists.  The moderate muslim psychiatrists I know think they’re psychopaths.  Why are our political leaders and their media not equally concerned?  That’s what concerns me? Indeed as my moderate muslim friends are against the fundamentalist and extremist muslims, those who don’t wish to integrate into Canadian society but rather wish to dominate and subjugate Canadian culture or isolate and plan jihad, then quite simply the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  Hence the Jordan pilot,a muslim, and the Kurdish women brigade, muslims, are my friends.
My concern is whether my leadership or their propaganda media are my friends?  I thank them only so far as their own violence has helped me clarify who are really the enemies of peace and the enemies of Canada and western secularism.

Politics, Meditation and Mental Illness

Politics is defined as the art or science of influencing government policy. I’ve always been surprised by the term ‘science’ in relationship to politics but political science is defined as ‘the social science discipline that deals with the systems of government and the analysis of political activity and behaviour. ‘  A scientific study did show that voting was influenced by sunny versus rainy days. That’s good science.
 All aspects of psychology, marketing and logic and rhetoric go into the ‘power game’ of ‘politics’.  Indeed war was considered the last act of diplomacy.  So politics might include nuking the enemy when all else fails.  It’s not a particularly ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ field if one views history.  Politics has been part of the social behaviour of cannibals and the Amish.  Nazis and Tibetans have politics.
I’d hazard to say that Meditation, the reflection on God or oneness or breath, alone, by oneself, is perhaps the exact opposite of politics.
Monasteries have major political disputes once two monks get together in a cell.  Lovers are fine until the government of bed enters the equation as in ‘whose going to make the bed.'
I’ve had moments of mental illness when I’ve become involved in politics personally. I vote. I contribute money to political parties.  But rarely have I actually got involved in ‘governance.’  I’ve been a ship’s captain and keeping a crew from mutinying when they are frightened has taken all my moral reserve.  Marriage has had me thinking ‘all’s fair in love and war’.
To this end I appreciate the irony and difficulty involved in herding cats and humans.
Lovely studies like the “experiments’  show that most people will devolve quickly to murderous behaviour despite all their pollyanna high minded spiels of peace and good will.
All around the world there are clear and evident examples of the masses of people and large groups acting poorly given half  a chance.  What’s actually miraculously  quite abnormal is to see people acting well.  Those who think it is our ‘nature’ to be love children are to my mind, the most mentally ill, delusional, and likeliest to project their murderous rage on their neighbour.  (They’re commonly attracted to the left wing which generally lacks standards so celebrates inclusivity and later gets into difficulty justifying pedophiles in their midst).
Our closest animal neighbour is the chimpanzee and ask the peaceful rhesus monkey how it likes living beside these fellows when they have a hankering for monkey brain. Even the peace and love bonobos who share equal DNA with chimps and man aren't loathe to kill other primates in a political way.  So, for the mentally ill among us, killing is a ‘natural’ human trait.
However in the war research of “On Killing”,  by Lt Col Dave Grossman, he has noted that collections of humans range from very good killers to not very good killers.  Robert Hare the forensic psychologist has specifically looked at psychopaths and sociopaths.  My favourite Sgte Major described his own killing propensity as “I don’t like killing other humans but there are wolves and I’m like a sheep dog.  The wolves want to kill the sheep and I want to protect the sheep. Killing wolves follows from that."
We are living in a time when the sheep baaas and blatting have loud speakers called media and internet.  The mentally ill deny their capacity for killing but are noted to enjoy the benefits of having killers among them.  Presidents and Prime Ministers who are associated with  the most violent of all, the ruling elites, (the billionaires, the tyrants, the democratic leaders, UN leaders, etc) all would disarm their populations while reserving the right to be surrounded by gun toting secret service and secret armies.  Rarely are these men and women armed themselves so that they can maintain the lie.  It’s always best that others don’t know your riches. Weapons have always been like gold.  Bankers love to have lots of folk with major weapons protecting them.
So I did my time when younger, serving as secretary, vice presidents, and presidents and leaders in various organization.  All my life I’ve been a member of churches and community organizations ‘volunteering’, but not particularly enjoying it.
The nature of my work is people in conflict.  I’ve trained extensively in the politics of groups and family and individuals psychopathology.  I’ve watched corruption permeate unions and administrations.  I’ve had my life threatened and my family threatened when I’ve been effective in curtailing abuse.
Most activists are irrelevant.  They are predominantly distractions.  When the rubber hits the road, money is defended by weapons.  Those who threaten wealth will be threatened. I tell political folk if you aren’t being ridiculed, threatened and demonized and called ‘mentally ill’ then most likely you are helping and enabling the very people you claim to be against.
The thing that all political scientists will tell you is that politics is complex.  Science is ‘multi factorial’.  I loved to play chess. It was the fundamental game to teach leaders politics and war. There are moves within moves.
I got distracted by politics this fall.  Normally I’m trying to keep my head down.  Canada is a terrifying country when you question authority.  It may be the least terrifying country to question authority in or it may be the most deceitful. I belonged to a group called the “psychiatrists against the political abuse of psychiatry’.  When one questions the killer elite (that 1-2% of society that hold power by force) one is imprisoned in a jail or an asylum.  In Canada as opposed to China, Russia, Saudi Arabia or Argentina, political dissidents are rarely killed. They are usually ‘discredited’, and lastly put in jail or asylum. I was for a time a member of Physicans Against Nuclear War, Human Rights Association and the Canadian Civil Liberties.  I have been frankly humbled and terrified by state power and frankly quite ashamed of my own cowardice and how little I tolerate pain and how easily truth can be discarded by the authorities who actually will tell you “we make the truth’.
Since my own “close encounter’ I have worked with torture victims and refugees from countries where the authorities are more heavy handed than here. I know most Canadians don’t know what they’re talking about. I have friends who ‘whisper’ still despite being in Canada for 20 years.  It’s something I’ve yet to learn. That’s what’s so different about Canada.  
So I’ve really avoided ‘politics’.  Friends who knew me for causing student rebellions and overturning university magazines with acid tongued satire and political writing haven’t recognized me in recent years. I’m a coward. That’s the difference. I’m no longer innocent and I certainly don’t want to be a fool. There’s no ‘one bad man’.  Modern times are a cowboy show. There’s not ‘good guys and bad guys’.  It’s all a bit grey. The war of words is covered by the ‘fog of war’ just like the real war zone is.  The evil is a ‘nest of men and women’ who are paranoids.
I stopped believing in the left or the right having any true distinction because the ‘elite’ will use whichever political system gives it the most control.  I’ve actually begun to think they’re ready to shaft religion too for the ultimate power of ‘one world order’.
My main dialogue is with God.  While I know God works through people and all of that I personally believe my focus needs to be on the transcendent. I belong to an organization that discourages even ‘righteous anger’ . But having decided a law degree would only help me with increased materialistic wealth, as the courts today are solely about money, and they’ve become a legal theocracy above all else, I thought I’d study for a master of divinity.  I had done a ll the ecumenical studies in Christianity and extensive comparative religious studies and world religion studies.  I was arguing more with God and yet having faith in God’s love.  I worried about arguing with my parents because they’d just send me to my room. When I was married my wife would always win arguments with bedroom violence, the siege techniques of the headaches. It became obvious that no matter how ‘right’ I was others were more prone to covert aggression and less interested in the truth.
I loved books, like Brothers Karamazov, King Lear, the Gospel, The Torah, the Bhagat va Gita, the Koran, Thus Sayest Zarusthra, Franny and Zoe, Yogananda, Of Human Bondage, William James, Das Kapita,  For years I’d study chemistry in the day and read the great tombs of literature in the evening. My wife at the time was a party girl and found my interest in book stores and intellectuals rather offensive.  She liked light hearted chatter with agreeing girlfriends and family and avoided dialogue having come I’d later learn from a violent home where alcohol and fists ruled.
I have known always that homicide or suicide don’t win an ‘argument’.  The person who does either ‘loses the debate’, simply because I don’t believe in death.  I also believe if I wanted to be a killer I could be a better killer than anyone I’ve met. Which is why I became a doctor because it’s much harder to revive someone than it is to destroy them. My colleagues are still working on a cure for radiation poisoning.  I’ve become adept at healing PTSD and really did a lot for people with head injury when no one else found these groups ‘sexy’ or ‘lucrative’.  I’m less interested now that i know more colleagues who are superior clinicians in Neuropsychiatry and some of the great military psychiatrists are finally getting their due for their research in PTSD.  There’s an irony that head injury research had to wait funding not for all the soldiers but for the hockey players and football players to appear to have concerns.
But personally my argument is with God.
My brother developed cancer this spring. He’s a young man. I was with my mom and dad when they were growing old and dying.  My brother’s cancer is to my mind a product of the stress he’s faced being a good man in this country of Canada. He’s the best man I know.  He was my big brother and protected me from bullies. We went to boy scouts together.  We canoed. We hiked, We hunted.  My dad and he and I and a dog were a ‘unit’ in the woods together. Fishing mom would come along in the boat but hunting it was just us three with my brother watching over me. Later he’d join the Billy Graham Movement, a really high minded man who was a leading academic and great sports man.  He’s still playing hockey. He has been married all his life it seems to a beautiful brilliant woman and the  two have had the most incredible brilliant sons all really smart fine people, engineer, geologist, psychologist. They’re hilarious and help out and work together.  They’re a Canadian style Salvador Dali Rockwell Family painting in a Group of Seven backdrop. .
I believe my brother’s cancer is a product of the stress its’ become for good people to be good and do good work in Canada today.”  It wears one down.
I’m in Vancouver where there’s a criminal every  block. The principle economy was drug dealing. There’s gangs and killings and it’s all packaged for tourists like some pretty place where everyone is ‘pretty’.  Yet the principal housing market has been dominated by offshore money which we hear by and by has come from factories run by killing workers or by communist gang theft or simple off shore graft.
My brother and I were in boy scouts.  I loved the movie “The Last Boy Scout”.
As a family we recently watched Star Wars together.  Notice these themes that appeal to the ‘underdogs’.
Politically I got pissed off after my brother got cancer.  I have watched health care funding in Canada plummet and our hospitals become dominated by whack jobs.  We have 20 times the administration of Germany with its equivalent if not superior medical care.  Every doctor including myself lives in fear of political interference.  We are told by lawyers to avoid drawing attention to ourselves. We are literally told to do the least for patients. Our political apparatchiks tell us the patient is the ‘customer’.  I am punished for doing more never for doing less.
So then some wanker calls me a “Climate Change Denier”.  This moron calls me ‘psychotic’ because that’s what ‘denial’ is. He says I’m not a scientist because I’m tired of pseudoscientists from the Silent Spring book, to the Ozone layer, then Methane Layer, Global Freezing, to Global Warming, to now Climate Change Fraud demanding money from real science for this attempt at making the UN a one world order and Agenda 21 the halcyon call for the killer elite of tyrant countries at the UN where freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of science are literally outlawed.  In all these racist sexist  UN countries there are scientists like Gallileo rotting in jails.  The Saudis and the Thais arrest anyone who questions the divinity of the king.  The Saudis behead them.
Now our government has given a few billion dollars to the UN wankers and the Climate Change Cult has spent a trillion and a half on bogus ‘save the planet’ bs, meanwhile I’ve watched medicine cure AIDS, erase epidemics, counter schizophrenia. It’s been a miracle after miracle working in the world of real science. We’ve put people on the moon and are sending people to Mars soon. We have lazer surgery and have extended life expectancy and cured countless baby deforming disease in the womb. We, the real scientists, are daily faced with government restrictions because the politicos want committee meeting after committee meeting to discus their coffee breaks.  All the while I guess I see my brother having a curable disease, a mere cancer and I’m wanting all that bogus waste of money in the Climate Change Cult budget going where it needs to go, the cure of cancer.
So I went ballistic when Justin Trudeau won and took a 380 friend multi million victory party to Paris and  gave billions of dollars to the UN tyrants and killers for their bogus pseudoscience scam Climate Change.
Meanwhile I work each day with heroin and cocaine addicts whose pushers are driving ferrari’s and the police are unable to catch them because of the corruption in our legal system that allows drug dealers and their rich political friends to get around the law. Meanwhile I live in fear like every other Canadian that I will make any mistake because I know that the police will have a swat team on me and the Revenue Canada will freeze my accounts and send in a mob of consulting accountants if I make even the tiniest mistake,Meanwhile criminals and drug dealers and lying climate change cultists and fat cats galore get away with rank evil.
I don’t do well with politics any more. I have a flashing ‘suicide/homicide sign in my head and begin thinking of gassing myself and setting myself on fire because the sheer stupidity and corruption of the system sickens me.  Meanwhile I share on face books because I keep thinking I can wake up cabbages.
But we’re all really happy slaves.  Well fed.
One is mentally ill to question authority in Canada. One is perhaps even more mentally ill if one doesn’t at some time question God. Atheists might do well to question themselves.
Now the Muslim Migrants en mass are coming and I’m flash backing to the sheer terror I lived in during the IRA bombings in London and I know Justin Trudeau doesn’t care.  The elite are protected. They live here in West Vancouver. They don’t live in Kitsilano or Richmond, or even Shaughnassey. They certainly don’t live in the Downtown Eastside.
They have lear jets and howitzers and helicopters and private armies and if they get cancer they go to Swiss Clinics and Mayo and thankfully there is ‘trickle down science’ and we learn from the cures that they get for their cancer.
My brother is getting great care and the cutting edge in cancer treatment.  My parents had great medical care. Our family has had really good medical care. And I’m just afraid.  My Prime Minister is offering us marijuana and physician assisted suicide. I’m past retirement age but like all north americans we’re being told that we can’t afford to retire. I don’t want to retire. I just thought I’d have this trade and be able to practice this trade called ‘medicine’ wherever I went.It’s like a carpenter but now there’s a baurocratic tollgate for every action i take. there’s a tax on using the outhouse.
So I’m frustrated. I think the government is throwing money away on cronyism and not addressing the real issues. So I got involved in politics. I became a ‘critic’.  I’m spiritually supposed to be celebrating the positive and ignoring the negative.  I just can’t see any positive. It’s my perspective.
I don’t like being a critic. I like to sing Kumbaya and have group hugs and put my head in the sand like an ostrich. I like to meditate. I like to be  a hermit. I’m happiest alone in Canada’s north with a trailer a truck and a rifle and a dog. I occasionally like others for brief periods.
I like helping people, healing, know my chemistry and pharmacology but mostly like to watch ‘relationship therapy’ in action.  As my lawyer friend said, I saw you become a doctor and thought that if you can get through school so could I. Now I watch addicts and alcoholics stop drinking and drugging figuring if a loser like me can get through life without smoking cigarettes or smoking dope or getting drunk or shooting up, maybe they can.  I have far more pleasure and joy than the average person. i’m blessed beyond any desert I have. I’m grateful for the impossible mercy of the universe. I’m in love with life at times. I’m thankful to be human.  I know so much depends on perspective. I see the effects of my patients depression and mania on the same situation.  I know these things.
But I don’t like politics. I don’t like playing the critic even if I know it’s a game. I don’t think I’d like killing the enemy but I’d be a damn good sheep dog.
Right now we’re in a war of words.  We’re losing.  So much we took for granted like ‘freedom of speech’ is gone.  We have massive propaganda and marketing budgets keeping us collectively stupid. There is a conspiracy. It’s call the Elite or the state and you. I knew Reagan was an actor so I didn’t mind if he was a puppet at times. He was a believable puppet. Justin Trudeau is a high school acting student. He’s just not believable.  His insincerity is so transparent. I have to give him credit he’s trying.   I would rather celebrate the good guys but frankly I don’t see any yet on the other side. it’s not that our Prime Minister is so bad but it’s that ‘this is the best we as Canada can produce’, a high school teacher with a winning name and a cupcake body and Justin Bieber smile.  This is all we as Canadians can put forth.
I want a Winston Churchill even knowing I’d probably have been a critic of him or an Ataturk or a Jefferson.
I really must get back to talking with God. I truly believe he’s the one that’s the primary producer , director and writer of life so there must be something I’m not getting and it’s fundamentally in my relationship with God and not anything to do with cancer or Justin Trudeau or Migrant Muslims.
I’m aging and coming to terms with my death and looking back on my life and thinking that all those ‘ideals’ I believe in and fought for, and sacrificed for,  like ‘freedom’ ,are evaporating.  We know, too,  “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” I think of that each day as I see the food lines and shelters and tent cities increasing in Canada.  There’s a great image in Dr. Zhivago when the smart money man looks out on the street at the starving people outside the restaurant.  I like Douglas Adam’s ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ image best.
Maybe I fear I will be a prisoner of death. I’ve known always that homicide or suicide can free me from life. I say ‘homicide’ and mean, I could ‘hop on a plane’ tonight, fly to the front, whichever one, and join someone killing terrorists and no doubt get myself killed. I could walk out today and be a missionary doctor in Africa and die in the weekly persecution of Christians.  I am ‘free’ in this life.
But death. I think I’m afraid of it because I fear there will be no ‘freedom’ there.  So the encroaching totalitarianism in Canada makes me face the fact  that God has given me death around the corner and I’m not ready for it.  I realize I’m in this stream of life and I literally can not swim back against the rising pressure of history, biography and science..  My brother is no longer ‘free’ because he has a cancer, like a parasite, attached to him.  I know he wants with all his life to be free of this rebel within, this disease that goes against everything he believes in.
I’m sorry I’ve been angry with politics and government and all the media nonsense. I’m sorry I’ve argued with friends and strangers on Facebook. My argument is with god.  I know this.  I have faith but still that doesn’t mean I have to go quietly. My meditation these days is more a 'nails on glass' scream.  I’m past the point of ‘om’.  I’m not ready to say ‘amen’ either.

Non-violence and Religion

The Islamic claim to being a ‘religion of peace’  seems outright a bald faced lie. However like Communism , the idea is that ‘if you let us rule, we will provide world peace’.  This is a tyrants promise.  Like the Mexican standoff, one asks oneself if it is right to lay down one’s arms first.  In the Nuclear Disarmament agreements there was always the chant of ‘lay down arms first’ but this chant is usually the voice of the enemy.  Mutual disarmament and mutual retreat from violence as anyone who has been there knows isn’t a matter of one side laying down arms as an example to the other side but rather a mutual process of combined withdrawal from the precipitous of mutually destructive violence.
In the East the Jains were perhaps the first to promote non violence to all creatures.  Not just ‘peace’ but true non violence.  Vardhamana Jnatraputra (597-527), son of a Kshatriyas chieftain renounced all war and all violence. Jains even concerned themselves with stepping on insects and blades of grass.
I found it interesting that the famous Christian missionary physician Albert Schweitzer struggled with the idea of going to the violent of continent of Africa because he himself was focused on peace and non violence and couldn’t see how this would be possible in Africa. He was walking on a path when he realized because of the modern study of microbiology afforded by microscopes than no breath or step could occur without death of life.  With this realization he was then freed to go to Africa to serve.
The Jains had retreated from society in the efforts to achieve purity of non violence but the Buddha following in this idea encouraged disciples to participate in society but to the best of their ability be non violent.  Hence warriors could be buddhist and indeed the great emperor Ashoka who struggled most with the idea of non violence and violence in civilization had Buddhist and Jain teaching but concluded that the very instrument of civilization, warfare, must in turn maintain the peace. It was recognized that without so called leisure class there could not be research, science, study and advancement, all the benefits of civilization and so Ashoka concluded that for their to be civilization there would be war but war would maintain the peace otherwise there would be anarchy.  Experiments in anarchy time and again lead to gang warfare and chaos and internecine killing.  It was with these reflections in mind that the Beattles famous for John and Yoko Lennon’s song, Give Peace a Chance were equally famous for their song “We don’t want a revolution”. That said, it’s difficult for all who make it to the top of these hierarchies to renounce the profit and reward of what is usually effort and war, actual or symbolic.  Carnegie gave his wealth to libraries the world over and increasingly there’s an ‘altruism’ among the wealthy today. But unfortunately so much of this public behaviour is later realized today to be done to avoid taxation and to gain even greater profit through influence.
Later Christian Quakers and Mennonites would eschew war but it would seem the Jains were not only the first major non violent sect but ones who did it with true gusto.
I have yet to find the Muslim equivalents, not that I don’t expect to find them, their being Suffi’s for enlightenment but it still seems a bit far fetched to call this religion the ‘religion of peace’.  It would be as spurious to call Russia, China or the US nations of peace.  Unfortunately especially for the stupid and the devolving idiocy of modern media, peace and war are not so much as opposites but indeed very much entwined.
Now the Muslims I know personally, and I’ve honoured to be friends of many, are themselves very peaceful educated sophisticated lovely people. However they are like me physicians or academics, middle class folk, not part of the upper 1 or 2 % of society that rules. They are further not in a Muslim country, Canada quite notorious for it’s homeland peacefulness and general politeness.  I have argued that politeness is greatest among the thoroughly subjugated so Canadians good manners may reflect more the extent to which they have been beaten down and lied to.
Since the first violence of the state is the elite and the rest the question of whether a religion is ‘peaceful’ is secondary to it’s initial value to the leadership who adopt it.  As Christianity and Islam are today the most competitive religions with Atheist Communism in third place perhaps the elite who have imposed violence and subjugation on the many, for good or evil, or expediency, must see in these three competing religions support for their regimes. It goes without saying that any state, government, monarchy can only have a religion that supports the population in general being punished and contained.
All three religions, Christianity, Islam, and Atheist Communism have ‘world dominion’ designs.  So none is ‘inherently peaceful’.  Each has allowed violence to be done to the population within and each in various ways has an expansionist theology.
This needs to be looked at further as it’s most unlikely that President Obama, Prime Minister Trudeau, Communist China’s Central Committee, Putin or the House of Said are today or any time soon likely to embrace the most peaceful of religions, Jainism, Quaker, or Mennonite Christianity.  I don’t even think they’re about to dance with the Suffis though a good dance is always better than a good fight.  

Psalm 70

Psalm 70
"Hasten, O God, to save me,
O Lord, come quickly to help me.
May those who seek my life
be put to shame and confusion
may all who desire my ruin
be turned back in disgrace.
May those who say to me, "Aha! Aha!
turn back because of their shame.
But may all who seek you
rejoice and be glad in you;
may those who love your salvation
always say
"Let God be exalted!"
Yet I am poor and needy;
Come quickly to me, O God.
You are my help and my deliverer;
O Lord, do not delay.

Well, that pretty well sums it up. What more need be said. The Psalmist captured my deepest feelings thousands of years ago.  His words are all that are needed this day in the 21st Century. The plight of this man remains the same.  I feel harried, threatened, anxious.  I am forever doing my best and yet feeling there are those with more time and more money and more means and that they will hurt me because they can.  I feel powerless.  I turn to the Lord begging constantly for help to over come the anxiety and fear I experience every day I go to work.
I know that technically this thing might be explained as some kind of post traumatic stress disorder. I might even be called depressed but I think it is more to do with the human condition.  There are forces beyond my control.
I am reading Karen Armstrong's timely text "Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Blood".  It is so far a masterful treatise.
She challenges immediately the simpleton's who ignorantly equate religion with violence.  Violence has always been with man. As a hunter gatherer violence was limited by the resources and the need for the tribes to focus on survival.  Only with the agrarian revolution was man able to develop armies. I love that she says the first real violence was within society.  The 'aristocracy',  meaning 'best' and their hangers on, bureaucrats, judges, advisors , developed armies to subjugate the masses so that some 2% of the society lorded over the rest who principally did the ugly work of raising food and building. Indeed this upper class shunned work. They were warriors but the idea of tilling or labouring or constructing was often beneath them. They preferred to 'administer'.  They also early found that 'organized theft' was the best means of expanding individual and collective wealth.  So lords proceeded from the earliest records of civilization to attack their neighbours and steal.
Theft is what war is all about and everyone is doing it.
I loved Dr. Samual Johnson's great words, paraphrased by Bob Dylan, "Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king".
That said, religion, to survive aligned it self with the warriors and rulers.  This goes for Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism and the greatest killer religion of all time, Atheism.
Now within the religions , starting with Zoroastrianism there was this 'guilt' about killing.  That's an interesting development.  This 'reaction' which appears to have resulted in interesting divisions in society and specializations so that the 'killing' could be done by this other group which was at once abhorred but obviously necessary. Because wealth stemmed from the army.  The army was divided later into external and internal army, or army and police because it also served to maintain control.
"The reformer is the enemy of any one who threatens the status quo".  So all of government and society is established to maintain the very forces that ensure the upper classes, that 1- 2% of administrative warriors retained their power.  All banking and all resources are managed to maintain supremacy of the 'ruling elite'.
For the silly and stupid, that means that Obama and Justin Trudeau and all the world leaders are there first and foremost to maintain those who are in power.  In the US these would be foremost Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.  Of course there are the Rothschilds and Rockerfellers but all billionaires have a major investment in maintaining this world as we know it.
Biblically Jesus called this world ruled by Satan.  Herod was the Jewish leader of the day who killed all the children fearing a prophecy saying that a baby would be born. Eventually this local billionaire leader would have John the Baptist beheaded because his girlfriend's daughter wanted this.  Pontus Pilate the Roman Empire leader would allow Jesus eventually be killed as a young man because the religious leaders of his day, who naturally were aligned with the ruling elite, felt he threatened the 'order' of society.  Hence the crucifixion.
Yet 300 years later Constantine, the Roman Emperor caught in an internal struggle noted that the Christians were the best fighters and that their communications. So Constantine had a quickie conversion, and won the battle of Milvian Bridge against Maxentius going on to make Christianity, the state religion. Thus began the Holy Roman Empire and Catholicism which would reign until Martin Luther with the backing of Nationalistic forces of the Protestant cause would begin to decentralize power.
Today, the atheists like to deny that their great atheist oracle Marx and his bench man Lenin created the greatest atheist empire the USSR which promptly killed 60 million and centralized war.
The Chinese atheists under Mao would kill 100 million.
I have never forgotten the great paranoia song of the group Buffalo Springfield with its incredibly brilliant refrain, "Something happening here, what it is aint exactly clear, man with a gun over there say, hey you got to beware, stop hey what's that sound, everybody look what's going down" and "people carrying signs mostly say hoorah for our side."
Now tribalism is the support of 'your group'. Sociopaths are those who will fight and defined their own group within any greater society.  Psychopaths by contrast lack any real empathy and aren't too good at groups. So it follows that for sub cultures the 'hero' is another man's 'terrorist'.
Personally, I like the Aryans. They were the Indo-Caucasian cowboys who moved across India and wrote the Vedas celebrating women, wine, war and cattle stealing. The Celts, the cowboys of Scotland and Ireland and Northern Europe did much the same,  Great warriors and cattle and women thieving.  Later the Indian society separated into the Administrative Brahma religion political class, the warrior class, merchant class, labouring class and slaves.  Prior to this 'warrior specialization' the leadership had focused on being the best killers. A little nation state in Africa has men who do just that even today, maintain their martial skills while the women do all the labour. That group hasn't become civilized to the specialization.
There has been no other successful civilization or empire.  The Khybers and all major political societies today have this history and intrinsic war motif.  The Communists have great armies and sell weapons. The NATO states are the greatest arms dealers and the leaders of the United Nations are all leaders who have been appointed by warrior countries.  Anyone who is not a great war monger is marginal and irrelevant to the powers of the day.  Even Iceland who kicked out it's bankers derived from the great 'organized thieves' of their day, the Vikings.
The Zulus were another group of cowboys.
Cowboys love their cattle.
Warriors are meat eaters. Meat has been rationed throughout history as the most powerful food source for action.  In Scotland the Lords, left overs of the great warrior castes of feudal Europe with its Kings and Queens, own all the fish and edible wildlife.  That's why in Canada today the State is trying to outlaw personal hunting and fishing and is licensing it and taxing it out of reach of the common man.  Indeed vegetarianism has always been encouraged as peasant food with the Irish potato farmers as the classic examples.  The world over, the chicken has been the meat of the people along with lesser fish.
"Guns Germs and Steel" by anthropologist Jared Diamond certainly supports this view of history.
Tribalism, partisanship and behind it all a desire to be home.  We are all walking each other home.  But the glory and the fight and the world of war is alike to sex and orgasm, hence 'all's fair in love and war'.  The two passions of all men.
And the denial. The people who say they don't like war.  They are commonly the 'effete' who detest the soldiers but love the power and wealth that they bring. They are the girls like Canada's protest singer who wrote "Universal Soldier' blaming the soldier. But she may as well have blamed Eva Brawn, Hitler's girlfriend because the girls are the ones who celebrate most the 'returning warrior'. Matriarchies have all been warrior societies and celebrated the wealth the warrior brings.
Krishna said to Arjuna, there will always be war and the war will always be between family members so the only real question is whether you will be in it or not.
So the poverty saints, like St. Francis and others have recognized that without war you can have poverty but with poverty you can still have God because God is truly universal where as Ferrari's unfortunately are not.  Neither is Chanel.
I fear even saying these truths because the evolutionary biologists have said that we have developed our human big brain for the purpose of 'deceit'.  Only by deception did little men kill saber toothed tigers.
I believe this is the truth and I believe the Psalmist called on God because he too was a truth teller.  And every one knows 'he is a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom'.  No religion is truly a 'religion of peace'.  So if you believe Islam is then I have some great swamp land to sell you.  The Klu Klux Klan by their few numbers are clearly less aligned with the major forces of war than Buddhists, Christians or Atheists.  Their 'meme' isn't nearly as duplicitous as that which all major religions can purport to provide.  Support for the warrior 'ruling elite' and 'solace for the losers'.  As Neitze said there are 'supermen' and 'slaves'.  A good religion is good for all but doesn't rock the boat.
But religion doesn't cause war.  Greed and power seeking and lust cause war.  It's a male and female thing. It's a very human thing.
So I'm still thinking that Peace is an elusive butterfly and Love conquers but not in some simple stupid way.  Faith surpasses fear but only with discipline and training. It is natural to be afraid if alone because only together has man and woman been able to face the foe.

Rate My Doctor

I was delighted to hear that Dr. Shane, one of the finest forensic psychiatrists in Canada, was working to limit the damage done by the Rate Your Doctor organization.  As a forensic psychiatrist he is not supposed to be popular.  I totally relate to him.

I just reviewed my rate my doctor site. I was mr popularity in school. I'm a psychiatrist and an addictionist. I've reported pedophiles who have had hundreds of victims. I've notified Transport Canada that their pilot is smoking crack or marijuana.  A lot of my work is done on behalf of third parties where the person I'm seeing is being assessed for dangerous ness to society or whether they are a risk to others in the workplace.  I'm a methadone doctor and I have had my prescriptions forged and have on several occasions discharged patients from the methadone program for illegal abuse of methadone or breaches of the protocols of the methadone program that require the physician to terminate the person's care.
I have been asked by the police to treat people for bestiality.  Routinely I'm asked to sign forms for people in which they are lying and wanting me to lie on their behalf to get money falsely from insurance companies or the government.  I say no and they hate me.

When I reviewed complaints I'd received 90% were because I'd 'diagnosed' a person as having a drug addicton or alcoholism and the person was being required to see me because of domestic violence or workplace safety issues or harm to children.

I am referred patients by doctors and commonly the doctor referring the patient doesn't advise me or may not know the patients history. I have refused to see several men because they tried to conceal from me their history of rape and violence against women.  I have found out this information from collateral sources. I have refused to see them because I have a female assistant who I will not put at risk.  I might have seen them if they had been honest with me.  I refused to see a Nazi once. He was very threatening. My windows were shot out. I've changed my phone numbers on several occasions and I've lost a staff member because of the venomous rage poured out at her by a patient blacklisted by most psychiatrists for their damage to property in the office.

My own life has been threatened on many occasions simply because my correct and truthful assessment has resulted in a person losing their income because of dangerous drug addiction, because they were hearing voices telling them to kill their boss and I am required by law to report this to the person they are threatening, that they were under control of spirits that wanted them to violate children and I am required by law to report this to child protection service. When called by the RCMP regarding whether threatening and dangerous persons should be issued a firearms license I have had that person turn up at my office threatening me. One person sent to by police after an arson attempt tried to pour gas on me and set me on fire. The police accepted the person needed to be restrained.

A patient brought a gun to an interview demanding I give them valium.

I was a supervisor in the dangerously insane ward of the asylum. I did see patients in jail. I was a supervisor in the psychiatric emergency.  I have been a supervisor in a detox unit.  i have many times had to say no to people who felt entitled to services which they were not and they were not willing or could not  pay for those services.  I have had patients come to my office demanding an MRI saying they need one and their stupid gp won't give them one and if I don't do it they're make me wish I had.  They want the MRI for free because they're involved in some litigation and hope that the MRI will help them get more money. However they don't meet the 'criteria' for MRI .

I have always worked in the areas of greatest need. When I was a country family physician and northern flyin doctor I was much loved and appreciated.  When I was a psychoanalytic psychotherapist I was highly regarded.  When I began working in areas where I was required by law to serve the state and the client or have to consider the rights of children as opposed to parents and doing occupational psychiatry where the issues of safety sensitive factors employment arise,  suddenly I've got this filth on rate your doctor.

When I diagnose alcoholism the pilot is required to enter a treatment program. Their disease is so severe that they want to 'kill the messenger'.  They are putting their co workers and others not to mention millions of dollars of company property at risk and they are very angry at everyone whose job it is to think of more than just them but consider the life of others.

There are 'feel good' psychiatrists. They are junior psychiatrists and they rarely have the responsibility for major decisions outside of the individual.    They can remain 'popular'.  They are not Forensic Psychaitrists.  They are not Occupational Psychiatrists. They are not Addiction Psychiatrists.  They are not Emergency Psychiatrists or Psychiatrists that work in the Asylum.  They never say 'no' and their patients love them. I sometimes have the unhappy task of treating the patients of these doctors who have left their patients grossly addicted to a variety of medications that the patients are very angry to be having to stop when the 'good' doctor gave them this and they can't understand why he won't see them or why he can't prescribe to them anymore.  Many of these 'good doctors' have lost their 'prescribing' priviledges. Not Ironically a couple of these psychiatrsts are called as the very best psychiatrists and I could just throttle them for the mess they made of their poor patients which we in addiction psychiatry are left to clean up.

I have one patient who is still angry with me because I stopped her from killing herself.  She insists that if I didn't resuscitate her God would have saved her baby from dying.  There's no reason outside her psychotic thinking to believe her death would have revived a dead baby but she wanted to try and I interfered with that.  I know one schizophrenic patient that believes anyone who is treating him "nice' is just preparing to kill him.  I have to be extremely 'neutral' with him. No medication has altered his underlying paranoia but he's not been chronically suicidal in my care.

I do use 'story telling' as a therapeutic tool.  I do cognitive behavioural and supportive therapy.  I do not let people venomously 'vent' about their ex-husbands or ex wives in my office.  This is not 'good therapy'. It's highly lucrative but it only reinforces the injury and re traumatises the patient.

I'm not being paid to passively listen to patients.  I'm first and foremost a medical psychaitric diagnostician. I have to be sure a patient doesn't have symptosn of anxiety or depression because of an undiagnosed cancer, brain tumor, thyroid disorder, or metabolic problem.  In a therapeutic assessment I'm informing patients as I go along often answering questions and correcting misinformation they increasing come baggaged with by reading fear mongering web sites which are selling a diagnosis or treatment.

I have far more effective 'tools' for helping people than passive listening.  I have done years of training in active 'listening' therapies but there are few who are specifically suited for these types of therapy. Less that 10 % of patient's referred to psychiatrists are appropriate for anything like the televison psychiatry models of therapy. Further the research says those types of therapy work best where patients are paying for that kind of care. Hence psychoanalysis is no longer covered by health care funding insurance programs.  I am specifically trained in 'change' therapy. As an addiction specialist I'm trained in motivational therapy which implies that the person will 'change'.  The state pays for psychiatrists to help people change for the better, not to make them feel good sick.  The health care system isn't in place to perpetuate disease. (At least it's not supposed to be)

My obese patients want to 'talk' about their problems but are very angry when I say after a couple of sessions or so , "If you're not willing to do some thing about your problem then there's nothing further I can do".  Based on a motivational assessment they aren't even in the 'contemplation' phase and are best advised to come back in 6 months to review what they're willing to do about their problem. All the 'life style' disease problems don't get better by having patients go on and on about 'why' they drink, gamble, over eat, shop, hoard, live on pornography sites.  These people want to collude with you and talk about thier problems as a means to maintain their problems without actually doing anything about their problems.  As a result of research findings we're not supposed to see these people and perpetuate their illness by enabling. They are angry because they get tremendous 'secondary gain' by seeing top specialists and showing that another doctor 'failed' to help them because their addiction is a really sick disease.  It's considered a waste of tax payer money for specialists to persist in therapy where the patient only talks about change but doesn't make any actual change.

A large part of my therapy for some patients is 'educational' as is the case with all 'cognitive behavioural therapy'. Many of my patients however are referred because of behavioural problems.

Only 20 % of my present practice are relatively highly functional individuals with 'neurotic' concerns. When I had a psychotherapy practice this was about 80% of my patients.  My present practice for the last 15 years has focused more on trauma and addiction:  head injury, ptsd, personality disorder, and major medical illness.  Most psychiatrists exclude personaliy disorder and addiction and head injury from their practice.

Because I've worked in areas of greatest need I've always had very sick patients as well as less sick patients but more I've had a higher per centage of really sick patients.  Many of my patients have major medical and neurological illness. They are not likely to return to work but it is hoped that they can have a better health care outcome. Often there are a dozen other specialists involved in the care of these complex patients.  No psychiatrist in the "business" of medicine would touch these patients because they are extremely costly, timely and sick.  They're generally very unhappy with life and their medical care in general, frankly because they have had horrible events happen to them . As a psychiatrist I can't offer them a new life, or millions of compensation and often all I'm doing is trying to provide sometimes only 'palliative' care.  Smart and popular psychiatrists send these patients back to gps, avoid them like the plague, and won't see them more than once for a consult.  Dozens of my patients have been rejected dozens and dozens of times by 'cherry picking' psychiatrists.  Sometimes like me, other psychiatrists are just  overburdened  and may not be able to take on another highly disturbed patient.

I have to move my patients around so that my waiting room isn't a nightmare of trauma for the patients. I don't want my active crack using patient to come before or after the lady I'm seeing for grief after losing her baby.  I try to avoid having my rape patients  sit next to the sex offenders I see. I have a lot of difficulty managing my booking schedule and it's a real hard time for new staff who sometimes wil book three severe borderline personality disorders in a row and wonder why I look like vampires have sucked my blood at the end of the day.  I can't see two grieving patients back to back and I don't like seeing more than one manic in any day. I can see schizophrenics one after another.  There's a reason for that.  Most active addicts can not be seen for more than 15 minutes though for special reasons you may have to see them for an hour. That's usually far too stressful for them. The same goes with adolescents and people with early dementia.  I can only do one family, group or couple in a day usually because the intensity of the complexity is so draining.  Emergencies are always screwing up my schedule. Scheduling my office is like booking an operating theatre. It's a speciality in itself.  Despite notices patients often arrive with reams of paper work and cavalierly 'expect' doctors to just get this done by a deadline arbitrarily set by someone who usually doesn't know anything about medicine.  My schedule is booked 6 months in a advance. Now where is there going to be 'time' for this 'urgent' report thatn's never properly funded to be done.  Patients get moved to accommodate emergencies.  So every patient often thinks their particular 'need' (never want) is an 'emergency' and want you to just cancel or move all the other patients to accomodate them.  Sometimes we don't leave the office till 8 or 9 pm and often on weekends I'm working.



Because I do truama I'm commonly having to do medical legal reports and suddenly because judges (who scheduling problems make mine look trivial )  free up courts, I'm scrambling to have a report done and to see a patient so that this can all be available for a court date that moved sometimes months ahead. I'm a treating clinician and as such I have to be willing to provide these reports if  I am to be of help to my patients. I have much more control over independent medical examinations because I can simply not book these. They pay much more than regular psychiatry and most of my colleagues are doing these so they can continue to do the 'publicly funded' psychiatry.  More and more psychiatrists are simply not doing 'public funded' psychiatry but rather working in administration, on salary or doing private work for companies and insurance.  Private psychiatry has high overhead, no benefits, no pension, no cars, no lunches, no fixed hours, no overtime.  My colleagues in 'salaried' positions are rich and luxurious in their slower paced much more highly rewarded positions often far from the maddening crowds.

There's no money where the most angry patients live and the risks are increasing every day as the cost of the complaint process sky rockets because of all the "time loss" for private clinicians. When a patient complained I wouldn't see them that day, I lost a full day of work, having to cancel patients and re book them so that I could accomodate this 'bully' who wanted to jump the queue and thought by threatening my secretary they could.  When I reported staff office theft I had to cancel an afternoon of patients to meet with the police and go over all the damage this irate and violent person had caused.

Everyone likes to provide one time 'consults'. The doctors who do this are popular with patients and commonly disliked vehemently by family physicians who want someone whose going to share the burden.  Familiarity breeds contempt.  It's really easy to see a person, get in and get out and hope to never see the person again. A number  of psychiatrists specialize in this approach.  This is essential in other areas of medicine but the work of psychiatry is in the ongoing and chronic care and the 'acute management' of sick patients.  The government expects the health care teams to take care of these patients and they do but more often than not the patients don't want this often 'factory' type care. They want to see a psychiatrist and not a counsellor with only 2 years of training and rarely the appropriate supervision.  The psychiatrists in the teams rarely spend any real time actually meeting and  talking to patients.  They adjust medications maybe every 6 months.  When I worked in mental health teams only a small portion of my time on salary was devoted to direct patient care. The majority of times I was going to committtee meetings, meeting with other staff, reviewing reports, making phone calls, doing lunch.

I talk to patients. I listen to patients.  I am known by patients. I'm an open book.  Most of the patients who chose to see me and want to see me want to 'change' and want more than a band aid. Many of my patients come in at a particularly low spot in their lives and leave restored. I joke about my practice saying "I overhaul ferraris or sometimes just tune up ferrari's:. The people I choose to work with are usually survivors or fighters.  So often I feel priviledged to be a part of their journeys.

The majority of my colleagues who are practicing frontline clinical psychiatry are facing all the same systemic problems as I am. I see the addiction doctors and the occupational pscyhiatrists and forensic pscyhiatrists are often faced with similiar complaints as I have.  I admire their work and feel sorry that so many of the people who I see doing a really tough job are the ones getting it in the neck becasue they're there. I don't respect those who are hiding somewhere far from the patients,  smiling. I may envy them at times but I don't respect them.  I also know I have some of the most amazing colleagues and some of those in other areas of subspecialization in psychiatry are my true heros. A couple of my favourite women psychiatrists are working all day long just like me but with injured children and a fundamental lack of resources in the community.

5 million Canadians can't find a family physician, 1 in 5 and of the people who need a psychiatrist maybe 1 in 10 at most actually get to see one once and one in a hundred actually get to see someone who will see them regularly.  20 years ago I could refer a patient to a colleague and they'd see that patient for consultation that week. Today I wait 2 years to get a patient into a pain clinic, 6 months for an MRI, a year to see a subspecialist neurologist, and thats just some of the wait list problems constipating the system and making all the patients who are often getting sicker and sicker while they wait incredibly angry.  I don't blame them but it's not my fault personally that someone other than front line workers are getting the big bucks of health care.  Whenever I hear of millions or billions of dollars going to health care I think of fat cats in committee meetings discussing how many 'meetings' they're going to have to discuss how they're going to spend the money.  I don't see the resources translating into services that make my or my patients lives easier.  

Many of my patients come to me because I respect their spiritual traditions so ironically for an overtly Christian psychiatrist I have a fair slice of patients from every other religion in the world as well as agnostics and atheists.  I love that the atheists tell me that they like that they know where I stand.  Freud was very Jewish.  Jung was spiritualist.  My Moslem patients say they  want someone who has a faith and wont' disparage theres.  My buddhist and hindu patients like that I support their mediation. Dozens of patients over the years have told me that they were discriminated against for their faith and that psychiatrists belittled their religion in countless ways they probably weren't even aware they were doing.

Patients are referred to me. Over the years I've accepted more patients from certain family physicians whose work I've admired.   I am not accountable for the tremendous shortage of psychiatrists.  I am not required to see all patients referred to me and turn away a dozen referrals a week because I'm overbooked or because the patient doesn't 'fit' my practice.  My assistant tries to communicate with the receptionists in the gps office. Many referrals come from walk in clinics where receptionist turn over and many doctors results in my assistants responses not getting passed on.  I am not required to communicate in this way.  I am only responsible for patients once I've actually seen them. I am not required to see a person more than once for assessment.

If I choose to provide care I do so based on what is indicated for the particular condition. Many patients want them to see me daily, 2-3 times a week, weekly.  I used to see patients 2 x a week and weekly.  In response to the shortage and because there are no psychiatric resources I've reduced the frequency I see my patients to what isn't ideal but remains marginally okay. I't's much easier to see a few patient frequently or a lot of patients for assessments. It's very hard to see a lot of patients at 2 week,  one,  three, and six month intervals in terms of scheduling. I have patients coming back to see me who I first saw 25 years ago.  What they had then was 'cured' but what they have now has come on with age and is a different kettle of fish. I try to see people I've seen before a s priority.  I've seen thousands of patients over the years so there's more and more difficulty getting people in when they return or when the need to be seen.

Walk in clinics are a very mixed bag.  20 years ago I used to have referrals from a half dozen physicians who I communicated regularly with and who knew me and my work and didn't send patients to me that they hadn't already thoroughly screened. This is not the cases with walk in clinics.  Commonly today I see patients who were seen by several psychiatrists that year or just got out of hospital and the referring family doctor doesnt' know this and hasn't communicated it.  I am deeply saddened by how little walkin clinic doctors know their patients and then I know many patients are 'doctor shopping' and 'specialist shopping' and their's no system tracking patients to see whose doing this.  One patient I knew was seeing three psychiatrists and I only learned when I wasn't paid for their visits to me, something I only found out a month later, having accomodated their 'emergency'.


I have been working without any of the resources I was promised in my training for nearly a decade.  I am routinely handling emergencies in the office because there are no resources in the community.  I am treating people who once were locked up for life without any of the resources they were promised when their hospital was closed.  I had  several head injured patients I was seeing every three months then had to see monthly and discuss weekly because the government closed their clubhouses and these poor tragic individuals were left in their rooms all day.  Naturally their psychosis got work and their angry outbursts increased.

No one notifies me months in advance that they're going to suicide.  When I had a psychotherapy practice like most private psychologists I was always on time and always on top of my schedule.  If a patient had problems I could send them to the hospital and they got good psychiatric care.  A few months back I witnessed my patient jump in front of a bus while my assistant tackled them to save their life and not have bus driver and passengers traumatized. I stopped my practice and spent an hour with patient the ambulance and finally got the patient to the hospital where they were discharged an hour later. So without any 'back up' the family physician and moved our schedules and patients around to see this incredibly sad and highly suicidal man several times a week until he was over his crisis.  Office practice was never meant to serve this purpose but there are no hospital beds and none on the horizon.

The hospital emergency used to have a ward where psychiatric patients could stay a week, then if they needed longer they had a ward where they could stay a month and then if they needed longer they could go to a hospital where they could stay for 6 months or years.  No body had figured out that all of this has gone and the money has been spent on 'planning' , 'administration' , 'talking' and 'politics' and 'ideas' and 'consultants' and 'business consultants'' and a whole lot of other things but the fact is there's no money and countless patients in dire need.

Some days my office is busier than a psychiatric emergency. Other days I think I'm back at the asylum.  I start my day at 7 am. I'm required to review my emails. I've got a hundred a day. Most of it is spam and the government won't pass the appropriate legislation to stop these 'business bullies'.  I am in direct patient contact often 10 to 12 hours a day. Some days I see 10 or 12 patients while others I see 50 or more.  I get dozens of phone calls a day and dozens of f axes and dozens of lab work and other records I have to review.  I rarely get lunch and drink coffee always on the run.  I feel guilty but still take bathroom breaks.  Sometimes I feel like not coming out of the cubicle. I routinely cancel lunches and miss all manner of engagements and have cancelled vacations many times to accomodate work demands. I have many colleagues who do far more than I do in this regard and there are all kinds of 'platitutes' out there about not working so hard but never do those spouting platitudes help with the heavy lifting or late night shifts.

When  a person misses an appointment and doesn't notify us in 24 hours those dozens of people on the emergency wait list can't be called. Those others who are waiting six months to see a psychiatrist in the lower main land can't be seen earlier.

A lot of people sent to psychiatrists are incredibly angry long before the time they get to see us. This wasn't the case 25 years ago.  Rarely was I referred an 'angry' person. Most of my patients were 'sad' or anxious. Now all the sad people seem to be creamed away by counsellors and psychologists whereas the angry and the angry/depressed/anxious are sent to us. My obstetrician colleague says the same. He's not had an easy delivery in years.  Like us his fee schedule hasn't changed and the amount of time he has for a patient hasn't been adjusted to deal with the aging population and greater risk.

The government has been cutting my income since I started practice. I made the most money I ever made in my life working as a general practitioner in my first job.  It's been down hill financially ever since. The government says they're going to cut doctors incomes again.

So I try not to read rate your doctor.  I wouldn't recommend for anyone to be a specialist clinician in Vancouver today.  I am really thankful for men of Dr. Shane's caliber who take the time to address the problem.

I see that there is a Rate My Judge site in the US but not in Canada. I really wonder if it's a good thing to have a criminal popularity poll against judges.  I know I'm terrified when I see pedophiles and violent people and psychopaths and sociopaths. I'm afraid to do the right thing because I don't want to face the abuse that comes from those people who want to fly planes stoned, work drunk, beat up their wives, have sex with their children.  99% of my patients are fine human beings. I know it's their 'sickness' but that doesn't necessarily limit the damage they can do.  Rate your doctor like rate your judge strikes me as likely to appeal most to people who are looking for a place to put their anger and carry out vendettas.

I noticed though that many people did rate my work positively and thanked me for my care.  I am humbled by that and very thankful indeed. It's the highest praise when patients take the time to share the positive. I realize I personally must make a greater effort to be thankful to all those I often take for granted because I 'expect' them to do their job. I know I too tend to 'blame' the customs officer for the delay when the fact is he's there and a half dozen others didn't make their shift and they not him account for the back up.

I  am more likely to be annoyed by the person who isn't doing their job according to my expectations too without realizing that my expectations of what they are supposed to be doing is not what their boss or the governnment or administration is telling that person to do.  It was said that a paediatrician has 90 minutes of examinations and things to do with a child before they actually see the child and hear the child's complaint for the booked 15 minute appointment.  Everyday I have a new and more absurd and utterly ridiculous demand put on me by some one who may never have seen a patient or have a clue about what a psychiatrist does.  This is increasingly common with insurance companies and employers.

Patients get angry about confidentiality but they have signed away that confidentiality to their employer or to their insurer and if their insurer is with their employer I'm required by law to share my records 'regardless'.  I'm now required by law to keep detailed records and produce those records for the courts as well.  It is against the law for me to not 'lie' for patients yet I've been approached hundreds of times by patients demanding and expecting me to do just that.

Just as I teach my patients getting over major trauma or cancer or life threatening events  to focus on the positives I have to do that myself.

Thank you all who have thanked me.  I really appreciate it.  And I'm sorry to those who I've somehow offended because I lacked the skill to serve you better despite the fact that I probably was not what you wanted. Somehow it's a shame the system results in such mismatches or it's just sad that people can't have what they want all the time.